Sandra Fatmi Hall was having a great day at the Caribbean Supercenter in Pine Hills.
Being surrounded by cuisine from Jamaica where she has roots, is always a delight for her. But on this day, Fatmi Hall’s delight quickly turned to something else after someone referred to her community in what she believes to be a derogatory manner.
“Crime Hills,” a nearby patron smirked, referring to Pine Hills’ reputation held by outsiders that the community is a center for violent crime. The man was engaged in a conversation with Fatmi Hall’s friend.
“Let me speak up right here,” said Fatmi Hall, a Pine Hills resident and advocate for improving the area. “Let me give you a brochure here so I can show you the work that’s been done.”
The man joked, saying he instead wanted a Pine Hills shirt. Fatmi Hall was not in a kidding mood.
“No, I don't have no T-shirt for you. Because you start off wrong with that crime business. So you're going hold onto this,” Fatmi Hall said passing the brochure, pointing to a picture of a group of Maynard Evans High School students she mentors in Pine Hills. “This is where you find me back here. And my beautiful people.”
“Crime Hills.” The name is like nails to a chalkboard for Fatmi Hall and longtime residents who call Pine Hills home - one of Orange County’s oldest communities. The unincorporated subdivision is about 70% Black and around 14% Hispanic.
The Crime Hills nickname is often thrown out as routine rhetoric when crime happens in West Orlando. It did so last year when a shooter took the lives of 9-year-old T’yonna Major, 38-year-old Nathacha Augustin, and 24-year-old Dylan Lyons thrusting the community once again into the limelight. But for years, Pine Hills residents have not only been working to improve the community but its reputation of being crime-ridden. A reputation that many say is undeserved.
“Movin' on up”
Cynthia Harris always bumps into someone she knows, eating at the Hardees fast food restaurant on the corner of Pine Hills Road and Silver Star Road. Her go-to order is a ham sandwich. While sitting, Harris, a resident of the neighboring community of Malibu Groves, spots her neighbor.
“He lives down the street. I have to fuss at him a lot about things he does at his house and cleaning up,” Harris said.
Harris usually spots someone she knows while at Hardee's – a staple of the community being one of the few constants to remain through all the changes and a bastion for the small village mentality Pine Hills used to have.
“I remember Evans High School had a four-foot fence. We just climb over the fence, come over here, grab some food, and go back to class,” said Harris, a 1985 graduate. She still sees some of her old classmates at Hardee's.
Tim Haberkamp owns the Hardees on the Pine Hills corner. He’s worked in Pine Hills for about 60 years - nearly the entire lifespan of the community, which was founded in the 50s with residents largely employed by Martin Marietta – currently known as Lockheed Martin.
“It was a tiny neighborhood,” he said, recalling having moved from Illinois as a child and helping his father with the restaurant back when it was a Burger Chef. “There was no tourism. The big thing for people to see, it would be to go down to Lake Eola and see the flowers,”
Back then, the community was largely white middle-class folks and had seas of orange groves rolling into the horizon.
Changes began in the 80s with homeowners moving away, Haberkamp said.
Harris remembers that change. When more black families began moving into very affordable three-bedroom houses.
“It was like the show ‘The Jeffersons,’ you were movin' on up,” Harris said. “Moving into Pine Hills and coming out of your communities that were predominantly segregated. It showed status.”
Lifetime Orlando resident, Pastor Kelvin Cobaris, remembers the community shift and said that’s when crime came to Pine Hills.
“You had gentrification hit downtown Orlando,” Cobaris said. “You had groups of people that moved out, investors bought homes, and then renters moved in with some of them, that didn't mean well.”
He said that’s when gang violence around West Orlando started picking up.
“It started with fights and schools and different cliques that formed gangs and from that, you get the violence that spills over to the street,” he said.
Crime Hills?
Around this same time, crime began in Pine Hills and all of Orange County. According to FBI statistics violent crime doubled between 1986 and 1996. Haberkamp says that’s when “Crime Hills” was born.
“The norm in Pine Hills was no crime, no issues. And then as soon as you started having it, the news media started looking for that,” Haberkamp said.
Pine Hills residents agree that media outlets coined the nickname Crime Hills, though it’s unclear which outlet used it first. Exacerbating Pine Hills’ reputation, were media reports that were erroneously listing crime scenes as having taken place in Pine Hills because it was a nearby well-known community, even though the crime didn’t happen there.
“We fought with them for years about how that wasn't even in Pine Hills. But anywhere that was near here, it was: ‘Oh, it's Pine Hills.’ No, it's not,” Haberkamp said.
Crime in Orange County continued to climb into the 2000s, reaching a high of over 7,000 reports in 2006, according to FBI data. About 12% of violent crime in the county happened in Pine Hills, according to Orange County Sheriff’s Office records. At the time, it’s estimated that Pine Hills made up 6% of the county population, according to the U.S. Census.
Over the years, crime has ticked down in Orange County. That’s true in Pine Hills, too, where crime decreased 3% by 2020.
“We’re Prime Hills”
Guenet Gittens-Roberts, of Doctor Phillips, loves driving to Pine Hills. Specifically, she loves getting Guyanese-style chicken curry from the Caribbean Supercenter – a place in Orlando that she feels is close to her Guyanese roots.
“When I go into Pine Hills, I go home,” she said. “I can find my food. I can find my people. I can find my music, and it just becomes easy for me.”
Gittens-Roberts agrees with her long-time friend, Sandra Fatmi Hall, that the Caribbean Supercenter is a perfect microcosm of Pine Hills.
“There’s a large population from the Caribbean that lives in Pine Hills, and we've always been active with the community. There's a lot of shining, great stories here,” Gittens-Roberts said.
She believes that community investment is what’s been leading to the overall decrease in crime seen in Pine Hills.
There are many stories and reasons for the decline, but one of the contributing factors is the group Future Leaders United - or FLU – founded and led by Sandra Fatmi Hall, with which Gittens-Roberts assists.
“The only flu you want to catch,” Fatmi Hall said.
The after-school mentoring program allows Maynard Evans High School students to engage with professionals and has given out college scholarships for the last 10 years.
It has a focus on providing mental and physical health services as well as prevention and intervention programs.
Fatmi Hall leads the kids to volunteer time at food distribution programs and beautify Pine Hills by organizing times to clean up litter in the community.
“They could take a different path, if not mentored,” Fatmi Hall said, referring to local gangs who try to recruit young students. “Guess what the statistics show? 80% of our young people mentored, take the right path, which is to be productive citizens.”.
The program recently doubled the number of kids it mentors to 200, serving other local elementary and middle schools.
Fatmi Hall is also the vice president of the Pine Hills Community Council, which works to improve the community with projects like adding lights at LYNX bus stops and cleaning up litter.
She said that’s how Pine Hills will take its name back, with residents investing in where they live.
Since last year’s shooting, Fatmi Hall said she’s seen attendance at Evans parent-teacher meetings tripled, and noted an increase of participation at the Planning Council -- she says a sign that people are invested in improving their community.
“I hope that we become a safe place to live, work, and play and that stigmatism of crime Hills goes away,” Fatmi Hall said.“We're not in Crime Hills, we're in Prime Hills.”
